Ponta Delgada & Lisbon, Portugal, Vigo, Spain, Le Havre, France, Brussels/Bruges, Belgium, rotterdam, NL, Oslo,Stockholm, Helsinki, Tallin, Gdansk and Copenhagen will be some of the ports we will visit. Can anyone offer advice on these ports? We would rather not do cruiseline tours, but in some cases, we would consider it. In St. Petersburg we are considering Denrus but a friend told us about Alla-tours. Does anyone have any thoughts on this? We would very much appreciate your help!

Hi patvhhi, welcome to Cruise-Chat. Sounds like a wonderful itinerary. Have you tried using the "Find" feature in the upper left hand corner of your post? If you type in your ports, it will pull up all the posts made about them. Sure wish I could help from personal experience, but have not had the privilege to visit these ports. Hope you enjoy Princess as much as we do. Which ship will you be on? We have sailed on the Sea, Sun, Dawn, Caribbean, Emerald, and Royal. My dream is to sail on every single one of their ships, so I keep trying. Hope you have a wonderful cruise, and once again, welcome aboard!

[QUOTE]Originally posted by patvhhi:, Oslo,Stockholm, Helsinki, Tallin, Gdansk and Copenhagen will be some of the ports we will visit.
Patvhhi,
I have been to these ports and had just posted a reply before you, so check it out it right before yours, I would love to help. I loved DenRus and would use them again in a minute. Our ship even had a meeting place in the one of the lounges for anyone going with DenRus.

Thank you, Janfred, for your reply. Actually, I printed out your post to keep it for reference. You visited some of the ports I mentioned. Do your recommend walking into town in Stockholm, Helsinki, Tallin, Gdansk and Oslo? Did you book tours through an outside tour company? I noticed that Alla-Tours offer tours in some of these ports. Did you visit Spain, Portugal and France?

Hi Patvhhi.
You can walk into Stockholm but after we took our walking tour we got on a bus to take us to the Nordic Hotel to go to the Ice Bar, but you can certainly walk around the area lots of little shops etc. You also can walk to the nice area of Tallin (beautiful)fairy tale looking city. When you dock in Poland you are in Gdanyia and its a shipyard and I believe its a little ways (miles) to Gdansk I wouldn't work we toured the city of Gdansk and went to Stutthoff Concentration Camp (very moving). Oslo the ship docks next to a beautiful castle and you can walk around and last Helsinki if I remember was close to town but a bit of a walk. I have not had the pleasure of going to Spain or Portugal and I've been to Paris not by ship. Lucky you a 27 day cruise I wished I was going!! You will have a wonderful time. Hope this help, You know Pat, when the ship had the tours out on the web a few months prior to sailing we printed them all off for each stop and study them before we picked, that was hard so many places to see but heck that is half the fun and how often are you in some of these places !